The King of Cool

continued

King began helping out back when the music center was on North Main. Her kids were taking lessons from Johnson, so she started cleaning up the place while she waited for them. "Now I do almost everything."

Back in the main building, Johnson describes his faculty. "Many of my teachers were my students. I know they know how to read and theory and how to teach it. Most rock-and-roll dudes say, 'put your fingers here, here, and here, and now strum,' but our teachers do so much more than that."

Brendon Lally matches Johnson's description. He had two years of lessons with Johnson as a teenager and went on to become a professional musician. Then he bumped into his old teacher at the Tap Room. They talked, Lally agreed to try teaching, and two years later he's got fifty students, five days a week.

"I've got an eight-and-a-half-year-old and one in his mid-forties," Lally says, "but mostly early teenage dudes who know the guitar is the coolest thing in the world. I teach guitar and bass and have four or five rock bands. I teach them how to rehearse, to tighten it up or hold to the tempo, or whatever. They all have a tendency to play fast and loud, and I try to get them to slow down a little bit and focus on the dynamics."